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Working-Class Housing in Birmingham During the Industrial Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Eric Hopkins
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It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , April 1986 , pp. 80 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1986

References

1 Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England, transl. and ed. by Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (1958), ch. III, particularly pp. 58ff.;Google Scholar his praise of better-quality building in, for example, Ashton-under-Lyme, , p. 52,Google Scholar is not often quoted; J. L. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer (1917): id., The Bleak Age (1934).

2 Ashworth, W., Genesis of English Town Planning (1954), p. 15.Google Scholar

3 For a recent local study of a town in the Black Country which touches on all these aspects, and refers to some of the more modern books on nineteenth-century housing, see Hopkins, E., “Working-Class Housing in the Smaller Industrial Town in the Nineteenth Century: Stourbridge – A Case Study”, in: Midland History, IV (1978).Google Scholar Among the numerous and valuable urban studies of the past few years, see Corfield, P. J., The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (1982);Google Scholar Daunton, M. J., House and Home in the Victorian City. Working Class Housing 1850–1914(1983);Google Scholar The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. by Fraser, D. and Sutcliffe, A. (1983);Google Scholar The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800, ed. by Clark, P. (1984);Google Scholar Dennis, R., English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Chalklin, C. W., The Provincial Towns of Georgian England. A Study of the Building Process 1740–1820 (1974), p. 22. This book is an excellent guide to house building in Birmingham during the eighteenth century, and provides the best modern account of the subject.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The Population History of England, 1571–1871 (1981), pp. 208–09.Google Scholar For population figures for other large towns, see Law, C. M., “Some Notes on the Urban Population of England and Wales in the Eighteenth Century”, in: The Local Historian, X (1972).Google Scholar

6 Chalklin, , The Provincial Towns, op. cit., pp. 22, 25.Google Scholar

7 For population figures in this paragraph, see Ibid. Victoria History of the County of Warwick, VII: The City of Birmingham, ed. by Stephens, W. B. (1964), p. 8; and the printed Census Returns, 1801–41.Google Scholar

8 The City of Birmingham, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

9 This is well-attested. Birmingham was essentially a development of the early-modern period, lacking the densely packed central areas of some of the older towns. In the mid eighteenth century, there were still plenty of middle-class houses with their own grounds in Central Birmingham, Langford, J. A., A Century of Birmingham Life: or, a Chronicle of Local Events, from 1741 to 1841 (2 vols; 1868), I, p. 102.Google Scholar

10 The City of Birmingham, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

11 Chalklin, , The Provincial Towns, pp. 196–200.Google Scholar

12 Sun Insurance Registers, policies Nos 221,313 (dated 2 July 1765) and 226,998 (dated 13 November 1765), London Guildhall Library, Ms. 11936/158.

13 Faujas de St Fond, B., A Journey through England and Scotland to the Hebrides in 1784 (2 vols; 1907), II, pp. 348–49.Google Scholar

14 Hutton, W., History of Birmingham, 4th ed. (1809), pp. 71, 77.Google Scholar

15 Chalklin, , The Provincial Town, p. 313.Google Scholar

16 These are the Report of the Health of Towns Select Committee [Parliamentary Papers, 1840, XI] (hereafter 1840 Report), the Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain [PP, 1842, XXVII] (hereafter Chadwick's Report), and the two Reports of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the State of Large Towns and Populous Districts [PP, 1844, XVII, and 1845, XVIII] (hereafter 1844 Report and 1845 Report).

17 1840 Report, p. xii.

18 Ibid., pp. 136–37.

19 Ibid., pp. 176–79.

20 Ibid., p. 204.

21 Chadwick's Report. p. 196.Google Scholar

22 Ibid., pp. 193–95.

23 Ibid., p. 197.

24 Ibid., between pp. 192 and 193. There is a photograph of a court in Bromsgrove Street in Chalklin, The Provincial Towns, plate 6, but it is clearly one of the newer courts. Both the entrance and the court itself are wider than the court depicted in Chadwick's Report, and the two-room house shown on the left dates from 1791.

25 This Street is presumably Russell Street, off Steelhouse Lane, which is shown on Hanson's 1795 map, but has long since disappeared completely.

26 1845 Report, Pt I, Appendix, pp. 2–4, 28.

27 Rawlinson, R., Report to the General Board of Health on […] the Borough of Birmingham (1849), pp. 23, 95.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., p. 29.

29 1845 Report, Pt I, Appendix, p. 1; cf. 1844 Report, Appendix, p. 2.

29 Chapman, S. D. and Bartlett, J. N., “The Contribution of Building Clubs and Freehold Land Society to Working-Class Housing in Birmingham”, in: The History of Working Class Housing. A Symposium, ed. by Chapman, S. D. (1971), pp. 232–35.Google Scholar

31 Calculated from the scale drawings in Prest, J.. The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (1960), pp. 74, 82.Google Scholar

32 Hopkins, , “Working-Class Housing in the Smaller Industrial Town”, loc. cit., tables I-VIII.Google Scholar

33 Langford, E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Gt. Britain (1842), ed. by Flinn, M. W. (1965).Google Scholar

36 Morning Chronicle, 7 and 14 10 1850.Google Scholar

37 Ibid., 10 March 1851. For a modern account of Birmingham building clubs, see Chapman and Bartlett, “The Contribution of Building Clubs and Freehold Land Society”, loc. cit. The statement quoted may appear to contradict the view expressed earlier that building-club houses were larger than average, but it will be realised that the previous reference was to eighteenth-century houses, and the remark that their quality was better than that of speculative building in Lancashire is noteworthy.

38 This point has some importance in that Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century, op. cit., p. 17, suggests that the Reports before 1845 noted that the newest housing in Birmingham, e.g., in Bordesley (not Borderley) was just as jerry-built and badly drained as new housing in Manchester; and this he regards as an indication that civic pride (presumably on the part of the Mayor and committee who gave evidence to the Commission) in the 1845 Report underestimated the housing problems in Birmingham. In fact, the reference to the Reports before 1845 must be to the 1840 Report, which states that the streets and drainage in Birmingham were very superior to those in Manchester and other towns in Lancashirè (q. 2,269), save in one district, Bordesley, where there were numerous back-to-back and chiefly modern houses; but this was not so in other districts (qq. 2,270, 2,274−75).

39 1845 Report, Pt I, Appendix, p. 2; printed Census Returns, 1851.

40 Rawlinson, , Report to the General Board of Health, p. 23.Google Scholar

41 Chadwick's, Report, p. 196.Google Scholar

42 For the state of rural housing at the time, see Burnett, J., A Social History of Housing, 1815–1970 (1978), ch. 2. Dr Burnett considers that the agricultural worker was almost certainly the worst housed among fully employed workers, p. 31.Google Scholar

43 Rawlinson, , Report to the General Board of Health, p. 26.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., p. 83.

45 Chadwick's Report, p. 194.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., pp. 209–10.

47 Vance, J. E. Jr, “Housing the Worker: Determinative and Contingent Ties in Nineteenth Century Birmingham”, in: Economic Geography, XLIII (1967).Google Scholar

48 The Morning Chronicle, 7 October 1850, claimed that “In Birmingham a labourer must be skilled to have the slightest chance of obtaining a livelihood. Accordingly, it is the mechanic, not the mere labouring man, that is in request”.

49 The Morning Chronicle, 14 October, gives an example of some houses with only one room. This room was on the first floor, and was reached by an external ladder, the ground floor being occupied by an ashpit, a privy and a brewhouse. Such houses must have been exceptional. For interesting and rarely attempted definitions of ashpits, cesspools and middens, see Daunton, , House and Home in the Victorian City, op. cit., p. 248.Google Scholar

50 For further details of Birmingham building clubs, see the sources quoted in note 37.

51 Daunton, , House and Home in the Victorian City, pp. 29–30, estimates that backto-back houses in Birmingham accommodated two-thirds of the town's population at the mid nineteenth century. This figure may be over-generous, but undoubtedly their numbers were large.Google Scholar